After a few episodes diverging into an iconic origin story and a bit of mysticism, Batman: Caped Crusader returns to more familiar ground in “Moving Target” – which, unfortunately, marks the return of some of the show’s most disappointing elements to the forefront. From beginning to end, “Moving Target” feels like an unfinished episode, full of underdeveloped characters, plots – and perhaps most disappointingly, animation, rendering the entire effort a garish, lazy mess of half-cooked words and pictures.
It can’t be understated just how hard “Moving Target” is to look at; full of awkward walking animations, stilted fighting sequences, and some incredibly lazy production quality (the amount of recycled character models in this episode is stunning), the seventh episode of Bruce Timm’s return to the Bat-verse is egregiously underproduced, to the point there are noticeable inconsistencies with lighting on character faces, or woefully stiff walking animations, as if the episode was shipped with a bunch of incomplete stock animations set as placeholders.
It completely sucks the energy out of what should feel like a dramatic episode, when a group of assassins descends on Gotham to complete an open contract against the city’s longtime police commissioner – who has become the biggest idiot in the room after being offscreen for a couple episodes, willing to put family and community at risk so he can swing dick in front of the people trying to kill him. At least his stubbornness serves a thematic purpose, providing a foundation for his daughter Barbara’s crisis of faith – the only part of “Moving Target” with any sort of emotional heft, as Gotham’s most loved and hated defense attorney comes to terms with the limits of the corrupt world around her (is there a Batgirl arc coming in season 2?).
However, Barbara’s internal conflicts are only a sliver of what fills the running time of “Moving Target”; the rest of the episode is an incredible disappointment, one completely disengaged from the tenants presented in its earliest episodes. The investigatory elements in this episode mostly take place off screen; Batman, whose presence is once again severely limited in “Moving Target”, does most of his investigation into the person ordering Jim’s assassin offscreen or in flashbacks during other character monologues, hardly a way to bring any sort of life to his work or his character (which, through seven episodes, feels incredibly flat, even for a Batman story).
And it’s in service of a disappointing reveal; when Batman figures out everyone (including Corrigan, the presumed straight cop in the group) is being paid to target Barbara rather than Gordon, the incredible tension building as Onomatopoeia pursues Jim, Barbara, and Renee immediately fizzles out, with the episode ending on a rather weak exchange between Barbara and the man in Blackgate Prison who ordered the hit in the first place (it was a disgruntled client who wanted to be in a different prison).
We get nothing about Onomatopoeia (except the fitting catchphrases of his namesake), nothing about the criminal ordering the hit on Barbara – the episode just ends with Barbara sadly contemplating her life in silence while she heads out of Blackgate. While I really enjoy the crisis of faith her character’s come to, it serves nothing in the plot of “Moving Target”, offers no resolution to any of its conflicts (internal or external), simply a chain of events reaffirming Barbara’s already-stated lack of faith in the system.
More troubling is how little it says about Batman, or Caped Crusader as a series; without any kind of pathos for Bruce, Batman, Gordon or anyone else, “Moving Target” is missing a lot of critical components that make for a satisfying, coherent Dark Knight story. Top that with some incredibly disappointing, flat visuals, and after a couple strong episode, whatever momentum Caped Crusader was building is gone, its most glaring issues front and center as the season heads into its final act (where I imagine the Thorne and Harvey Dent arcs will take center stage).
Though much of Batman: Caped Crusader has felt a little lacking in dimension, “Moving Target” is the nadir of the show’s efforts to date, an episode with an incredibly inconsistent application of its own ideas. With three episodes left, there’s obviously still a bit of time for Caped Crusader to right the ship of its serialized narrative, despite the best episodes of the season to date being one-offs into the stranger corners of the Batman mythos. However, “Moving Target” proves a fitting metaphor for the show’s shifting priorities from episode to episode, which, by the end of this interminably disappointing half hour, have left Caped Crusader feeling underdeveloped in so many critical ways.
Grade: D
Other thoughts/observations:
- I don’t know why DC always wants to do Deadshot dirty, but that’s Floyd Lawton making a fool of himself trying to assassinate Gordon in the opening scene.
- Gordon really believes that people know in their heart of hearts what’s right or wrong? What an idealistic 30 years of police work he must’ve had.
- Flask and Bullock immediately want to start another task force, which begs the question of what happened to the other task force they started this season, that had precisely one conflict with Batman and gave up the chase.
- Renee, to Batman: “can you not do that? Just appear?”
- The Blackgate guards joke about beating a “little Irish guy” until he died from internal bleeding, over a $50 debt. Subtlety has not been Caped Crusader‘s strong suit.
- Barb and Renee argue about privilege, with the former arguing that she wasn’t rich, she just grew up in “her grandfather’s house” in the wealthy part of town.
- Batman gets the contract against Barbara canceled… offscreen, presumably by beating someone up? Such strange omissions with Batman in this episode.
- Anyone hoping for Corrigan to be one of his more honorable iterations will be disappointed by his ultimate choice here – like most of the episode, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, but Caped Crusader doesn’t really care about that.